Tag Archives: review

While I know many of us struggle with tsundoku (積ん読)––buying mounds of books you never read––perhaps tondoku (止ん読)––starting a book or series and never finishing it––is an even graver crime. (Note: please see the last paragraph of this post regarding the word ‘tondoku‘) Sometime back I had read the first few issues of manga Inuyashiki (いぬやしき) by… Read More »

In recent years I have been spending a good portion of my hobby time on Japanese-related stuff (studying, reading, translating), but before I got into Japanese I spent a lot of time playing a few musical instruments, particularly piano. While this post will be a little off-topic compared to my usual focus, I thought my… Read More »

I’m a pretty big fan of Japanese gardens, to the point I remade my backyard into one, so I was happy to read “Minature Japanese Gardens: Beautiful Bonsai Landscape Gardens For Your Home” by Kenji Kobayashi (小林 健二). It is published by Tuttle Publishing. This book is a great way to learn about bonsai plants… Read More »

While I had watched a large number of Japanese dramas in the first few years of studying Japanese (and I feel it helped me immensely in many ways), at some point I started getting tired of the same hackneyed stories and cheesy acting. I’m also pretty picky about plot, and when I am able to… Read More »

On a recent trip to Japan (which I am in the process of reporting on here), I browsed through many bookstores. Because my reading speed in Japanese still hasn’t quite caught up to my English reading speed, rather than actually read a few pages of a book I generally focus on searching for covers and… Read More »

As a result of the various projects I’ve been working on over the last few years, I have many “hats” that I don from time to time––author, publisher, book agent, editor, marketer, and of course translator. It seems rarer and rarer these days that I take time to read books in English, instead devoting a… Read More »

While I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving print books (including E-books), Japanese audiobooks have some significant advantages. For a non-native speaker, I get extra information on the nuances of the text, especially for dialogue when there is a good voice actor. I don’t have to look up unfamiliar or forgotten Kanji characters, and I… Read More »

Compared to learning a foreign language in an environment where that language is spoken daily, learning away from such an environment has several disadvantages. In fact, that was one of the original themes of this blog. (I’m mostly talking from experience about Japanese here, but I believe this applies to other languages) Besides cultural things… Read More »

Although the hit anime film “Your Name” (君の名は) has been out for around a year and a half, I finally got around to watching it (yes, it was as great as I had heard). While there are probably hundreds (thousands?) of reviews on this movie floating around the net, I thought I might as well… Read More »

Those interested in Japanese novels and short stories have a variety of free options available: sites like Aozora Bunko (青空文庫) which contain older titles and “Shousetsu wo yomou” (小説を読もう) which cater to newer ones. While it’s relatively simply to just pull up stories from such sites on your desktop machine, I think many readers out… Read More »